tom chance's blog

Green Party MEPs have led campaigns in a number of areas I care about, including climate change, digital rights and employment rights. Jeam Lambert has led the charge on behalf of London since 1999, but I feel it is time to give a new person a crack of the whip. I believe that person should be Caroline Allen.

I am writing this in a purely personal capacity, unconnected to my elected roles in my local party and the London Fed.

When looking through the candidates’ materials, I was looking for a few qualities:

1. Strong understanding of complex policy to ensure they really can engage with and influence technical debates at the European level – Caroline has impressed me with her policy work for the national party, particularly in navigating through choppy waters around the science of GM and animal welfare to ensure we have a credible line, meaning we can actually have some influence. I think she would quickly get up to speed with her policy brief as an MEP.

2. The right approach to being an MEP – I like her combination of fiery radical rhetoric, engagement with London’s communities, and crucially her aptitude to “bring people together to work effectively and efficiently towards a common goal”. Politicians need to be radical pragmatists, able to see practical ways of furthering radical policy aims. I don’t want a Green version of UKIP, ever so principled but wholly ineffective at influencing an institution that has achieved so much for environmental and social justice, but nor do I want a wishy washy Green version of a Lib Dem just trying to win on anything and forgetting our deep critique of the austerity/free market project! There’s no use in an MEP who just talks to Greens, but also little use making links with other community groups if one doesn’t bring those connections back to the party. I think Caroline strikes roughly the right balance.

3. A proven track record in election campaigns – Caroline very nearly came second in the North East constituency for the London Assembly elections, gaining a record 30,000 votes. This brilliant result was in part down to her great work on the campaign, working closely with local parties to mobilise activists, gain lots and lots of media coverage and present a very credible face for the party at public events.

4. A party trooper – Caroline has involved herself in many parts of the Green Party. She has been active in her local patch in Islington, worked hard at the London level in recent years to make the regional party more effective, and dedicated herself to the thankless task of steering through major national policy reviews for which the entire membership should be thankful. I take from this that she will really dedicate herself not just to her formal role as an MEP, but also to the party, bringing all her work, experience and enthusiasm to bear.

Incumbents always have a huge advantage in these elections, partly because they are already well known to members through their work, and partly because members are naturally cautious of throwing out an experienced politician they know in favour of someone they know much less well. But I am very confident that Caroline could get stuck into the work of an MEP and do as good a job as Jean, if not better.

Sometimes it is good to keep experienced people in place. They have connections and they know what they’re doing. I’m not a fan of requiring people to step down just because others want a go. I would only advocate an experienced person stepping down if I thought there was a really good candidate to take their place. Caroline is definitely that really good candidate.

None of this is an implied criticism or Jean, or other candidates, many of whom I have had the pleasure to work with. I simply think Caroline is the best person for the job, and I hope we can see her elected to the European Parliament in 2014.

“It’s the economy, stupid” has become something of a mantra among many in the Green Party in recent years. Wary of repeating the crash in votes the party experience in the early 1990s recession, we have sought to persuade the public that we have something credible to say on the pressing economic issues of the day.

Caroline Allen has said:

I do not believe we will succeed solely by telling people what we are against, we must articulate a positive alternative. I believe we have a good framework but need to do more work here.

But beyond commentary and our “one million green jobs” proposal, I’m not what our positive economic programme for the nation is.

Let me explain.

Green commentary

Greens have some compelling things to say about our present economic troubles. For example,

• we have suggested that technological innovation may not be able to keep up with rising resource pressures, leading to rising commodity prices, and we have cautioned against exposing basic commodities to speculative derivative markets as they might – and have – lead to price inflation in basics like food and oil.
• Caroline Lucas has been a prominent and principled critic of austerity as a response to the deficit in a time of recession, making us one of the only parties in mainstream British politics consistently calling for an alternative.
• we have criticised the Government for failing to do enough on tax evasion and tax avoidance, pointing out that if we could close all the loopholes we wouldn’t need to make any public spending cuts at all. We have also highlighted examples where savings could be made with less dire social consequences, for example scrapping Trident.
• here in London we have criticised the loss of manufacturing and the many skilled manual jobs that went with it, leaving an increasingly polarised labour market comprising low and high end jobs with a hollowed out middle.

I genuinely believe we have a lot to offer in debates about the future of our economy, and a way out of our problem of low growth and a stubborn fiscal deficit.

But those are just comments on the present situation, and they tend to be seen by most journalists and experts as peripheral, not part of the core debate. We haven’t succeeded in moving or shaping the debate so that our concerns are central concerns.

Peripheral programmes

We have also developed various positive proposals that go far beyond commentary.

For example, our “one million jobs” programme in the 2010 elections proposed a large amount of government spending in areas including renewable energy, energy efficiency and waste processing. We estimated that these programmes could create one million jobs, delivering the double benefit of jobs in a time of high unemployment and major steps towards a low carbon economy.

This message has been developed and prostelitised by the Green New Deal group and the Green Party in the UK, by the European Green Party and by the United Nations Environment Programme since at least 2007.

But this message has failed to get through to the mainstream. It gets vigorous nods from environmentalists, and that’s as far as it gets.

The main reason is that people think we’re just selling our core environment programme with some recession-busting packaging. Recent focus groups have told us as much. It’s not just that the term “green jobs” starts with the word “green”, it’s also that we are confusing two issues that the public see as separate. They suspect we are really talking about our single issue, the environment, and not really addressing the economic situation as being important in its own right.

This isn’t so surprising when you consider that these industrial sectors are still quite small. We put a picture of a wind turbine on a leaflet, yet there are 94,000 people employed in that industry in a country with 29,280,000 employees. We talk up home insulation, yet in London the Mayor estimates a programme for one million homes could create 14,000 jobs. Even if you add up the entire low carbon economy including waste, water, air pollution, renewables, carbon finance, electric cars, the lot, you still only arrive at 3% of UK employment. It’s hard to imagine it being the big solution to our economic woes.

Green jobs may be a good way to create lots of jobs and reduce unemployment; to transform our energy consumption and so reduce our carbon emissions. It’s a good comment, a good proposal for some of the most pressing problems of the day. But green jobs don’t sound like a future economic programme for the entire nation. It’s hard to see green jobs making us competitive exporters  in the face of countries like Germany and China.

It would be like the Labour Party saying our future prosperity lies in opening more mines, or indeed some Conservatives pinning all of their hopes on the financial services. Those may be unkind and silly comparisons, but it’s probably what we look like to a lot of people when we say green jobs are the answer.

Questions unanswered

When we look for a future for the UK, we often look abroad for inspiration.

Should we adopt the Swedish or the German social democratic models? Should we compete with America to reduce regulations and attract multinationals? Do we want to protect London as the pre-eminent home of the financial services, or are we sanguine about losing this tax haven?

We can also find plenty of challenges and opportunities.

How can we compete with the rising economic stars like Brazil, Russia, India and China? Do we need more aiport capacity, a more flexible labour market, direct investment in infrastructure, or some other basis for a competitive advantage? Do we even care, can we relax about “going south” and becoming a less important economy? Now that Chinese wages are rising and their currency is less competitive, can we take back industries that fled to the east in the 1990s?

Then there are more basic structural challenges we face.

How can we reverse the huge increase in income and wealth inequality over the past sixty years? Do we want a more pronounced Labour approach of redistribution through tax, or do we want to ensure a more equal distribution of income before tax? If the latter, how do we keep jobs in the UK if we raise the minimum wage or seek to cap high pay? How do we pay for an ageing population with the additional demands that will place on pensions, housing benefit and the NHS?

Behind many of these questions lies something more basic: what is our economic programme?

You can sketch another country’s programme, or that of another party, quite easily.

The German social market approach sought to combine a market economy with strong state intervention to secure welfare, workers’ rights, collective bargaining, direct investment and high skills standards (e.g. with compulsory apprenticeships). In the past twenty years they have rolled back a lot of their labour market regulation and welfare spending, but kept a strong emphasis on a skilled industrial workforce and a high level of investment in infrastructure.

The Labour Party through the 1990s and 2000s sought to collect the eggs laid by the golden geese in the City – being intensely relaxed about their activities so long as they provided a tax revenue – and to splash this cash around on redistributive welfare to compensate for the problem that wages and pensions simply didn’t cover the rent, food and childcare. Instead of raising wages and giving workers more power to bargain for higher wages, instead of building homes and regulating the letting market to reduce housing costs, and instead of investing in infrastructure that could unlock industries like wind turbine manufacture, they ramped up revenue spending to compensate for the iniquities of a relatively free market. Their programme was a social market with minimal regulation and minimal investment, and unsurprisingly has come a cropper when the goose stopped laying such big eggs.

The Conservative Party think a more lightly regulated economy with a mobile population will be more likely to support and attract entrepreneurs, and that the rising welfare bill should be tackled by making people work longer, pay more and get less out when they need it. Their absent industrial policy has left their ambition to “rebalance the economy” exposed as empty rhetoric, and the failure of their austerity approach is being laid bare.

What is the Green Party’s economic programme?

Green shoots

One of the wonderful things about political parties is their diversity. You couldn’t possibly bring together tens of thousands of people without embracing different points of view, and rallying around shared values and a manifesto you mostly agree with.

Within the party I can think of a few frameworks, as Caroline put it, that inform our thinking.

Deep in our roots lies an assertion that continuous, exponential economic growth is incompatible with a world of finite resources. Nobody has ever really set out a compelling economic programme that follows from this insight, but Tim Jackson suggested some steps to do this, and the Green House gang are having another go at that challenge. Common features of frameworks that try to take up this challenge are industries that create lots of jobs relative to the economic output, reducing working hours and redefining what we mean by prosperity to be less materialistic.

These deep green frameworks are so radical that, to many of the public, they will either baffle or be seen as peripheral to mainstream debates. What can these frameworks tell us about the challenge from the emerging economies? from an ageing population? from an economy overly dependent on financial services?

They are also rather philosophical. It’s one thing to describe a kind of Platonic Green Republic, an ideal society in which citizens co-operate based on a dematerialised set of values, but it’s a different challenge altogether to articulate an economic programme that could take us from Britain in 2012 to an internationally competitive, vibrant “green” economy in five, ten or fifty years time… and to communicate that to voters in a way that persuades them we have the right ideas for the nation.

We also have a lot of ecosocialists in the party, including members of Green Left. Their “headcorn declaration” and manifesto are heavy on analysis, critique and commentary, and light on describing a coherent alternative. Where their ecosocialist alternative is outlined, it again follows from a critique that is interested in concerns peripheral to mainstream debate. So their proposals – transforming our use of energy, moving away from materialist consumption – are peripheral. It also doesn’t really say how we could get there, what kind of economic management model we should adopt and why they think this would enable us to remain prosperous (redefined) and competitive in a global economy. Between political philosophy and very specific proposals there is a gaping hole of macroeconomic theory.

There are many other currents of thought in the Green Party. I’ve long been attracted to programmes of economic democracy, seeking to put more property and power into the hands of workers’ and housing co-operatives. Some think the monetary system is key and set out a programme of reforms to banks and credit; others subscribe to the idea that we can “green” capitalism and so basically accept the economic programme shared by the past few governments with some big green tweaks.

We also have interesting proposals for welfare. For example, Molly Scott Cato and Brian Heatley of the Green House gang  published a provocative paper criticising the dominant welfare model – that of a safety net to support people back into work, with a focus on cracking down on scroungers. Their mutual security model instead proposes we give less support more freely and more flexibly to support a more creative and humane society. This could provide a programme of welfare spending that answers many of the mainstream questions raised by an ageing society.

How could these be packaged and articulated to answer some of those mainstream questions that remain, in my view, unanswered by Greens? What futures could we map out, what investment programmes, taxation policies and welfare systems could we propose that set us on a path to prosperity? How could these be encapsulated in something shorter than a manifesto, explained to a curious voter or a journalist in a way that sounds convincing, not just a re-run of familiar critiques or a mess of inchoate ideas?

Where does this get us?

Sometimes when I ponder these questions, when I discuss them with friends and colleagues, I get the feeling that we just don’t have enough brainy people working on and thinking about them. It’s not as though Labour, with all of their think tanks, brainy MPs and blue/red/purple movements have managed to set out a compelling economic programme. When the New Political Economy Network set out their prescriptions for the future of the left, they more or less described the Green Party’s recent election manifestos. So maybe we’re doing ok?

I wonder if I am just missing some excellent papers setting out programmes we could adopt, programmes that address mainstream concerns and go beyond the Green New Deal to describe the entire economy. If so, please leave a comment helping me out!

I also worry that none of this really matters. We’re a small party, we get very limited opportunities in the media and the media almost never give parties the space to set out a vision or economic programme. Our elected politicians do a great job of keeping in the major debates of the day and articulating clear, radical Green ideas and values. It’s tempting for philosophers and theorists to retreat into these debates, leaving doorstep campaigning to a sunnier summer, but that would be counterproductive.

I suppose I have written this lengthy blog post because I have reached a point where I am interested to hear others’ views. Am I being too hard on the party, on thinkers and groups like Green House and Green Left? Is there hope in the forthcoming work out policy committee is leading on our industrial policy?

Speak your mind.

Last weekend my friend Rob and I cycled the Dunwich Dynamo, an annual exercise in mass masochism where more than a thousand people cycle a 120 mile route overnight from London Fields to Dunwich in Suffolk.

Neither of us had done anything like this before. The furthest I’d ever gone in one day was 45 miles, but I’d heard it wasn’t all that hard so we went for it. As the day got nearer I read all the comments by seasoned Dun-runners on the Facebook group and started to get doubts. Energy gels? Tongue-in-cheek rules about getting through the pain?

This post is for anyone in my position, intrigued but unsure, and perhaps halfway through and (like Rob and me) really regretting their folly. Because it felt terrible at times, but by the end, and days later, I am so very happy I did it.

Cyclists gathering at London Fields to set off on DDXX

Preparation

I read every sort of advice, from getting in four or five 50+ mile bike rides in the weekends leading up to the ride, to the easy-going “you’ll be fine!”

I commute on my bike, in fact I go just about everywhere on bike. So I typically cycle six or seven miles a day. Not a lot, but enough to keep my legs working a little.I have done a few rides of 30-45 miles in the past, which were really very easy, but nothing since April. I still felt sufficiently prepared for the length.

My cycling in south London does occasionally involve some hills, which are the bit you’re best off preparing for. If you live in flat town, flatsborough, try to find some way of cycling up and down some moderate hills. Climbing them can be really hard work if you’re not used to it, and easy peasy given it’s only Essex and Suffolk) if you are. Probably half of the route feels like you’re constantly climbing and descending little hills, so it’s worth some preparation.

Staying positive

The hardest bit was believing we could do it.

Me and Rob feeling really positive in Braintree, Essex

Through Essex we were surrounded by small groups of racing friends and various larger cycling clubs, who all seemed to speed to the next pub, rest and take on some water, then speed on to the next. This meant we were constantly being overtaken, which I found a bit demoralising but which didn’t bother Rob.

He was more afflicted by pain in his legs, the constant up and down climbing through Essex, and the terribly slow progress you seem to be making when you count every mile.

So in no particular order, my three top tips are:

• Don’t take a GPS or any means of seeing how far you are, and try to follow others rather than referring to the route description, just focus on moving. Looking at my phone at our location at 1am was the most demoralising part of the ride.
• Stick with a friend, because it’s a lot more fun than being on your own and hoping to chat to strangers (who often then speed off) and you can look after each other
• Take it easy, don’t worry about stopping for sugary tea and rest stops (see timing below)

Timing

Your view for the night

We left at 8.30pm, so we had a nice stretch out of London in reasonable light and with a lot of people ahead of and behind us.

As we slowed down into Essex and were constantly overtaken I got a bit nervous about being too slow, which made me reluctant to stop too often. I even started to worry that we might miss the coaches, which was a characteristically stupid and pointless worry.

In the end we cruised down to the beach at 8am, hours before the coaches and after the sun had risen meaning we got to relax and soak up the sun rather than being in a rush or having to sit on a cold dark beach for hours.

These are some of our milestones, they’re pretty rough guesses but give you an idea of how well you’re getting on if, like me, you’re prone to worrying:

• 9pm – into Essex
• midnight – Braintree
• 2am – midway hall for soup
• 4am – cruising through the “Suffolk prairies” as the sun rises
• 6am – stopping for tea into the “silly Suffolk” section
• 8am – arrive at Dunwich beach

I knew people who arrived hours before us, and others were drifting in at nine as we polished off our breakfast. Do it at your own pace and enjoy it.

Equipment

Any old bike will do, just make sure it’s in good working order. My commuter hybrid needed lube on the chain so I squeaked the whole 120 miles, but was otherwise absolutely fine. I saw sleek racers, folding bikes, tandems, recumbents, everything really.

When I got to London Fields all I could see was lycra. Lycra and local trendy haircuts. Lycra is probably comfortable, but it’s not for me. I got on just fine wearing a normal shirt and shorts, with some thermal longjohns and a jumper as night drew in (it did get quite chilly) and some spare undies just in case.

Between myself and Rob we had a good supply of water, energy drink, bananas, dried fruit, chocolate raisins and rich tea biscuits. We also got the soup, bacon sarnies and sugary tea available en route. Rob’s theory was not to line our stomachs with a lump of dried fruit and sloshing water, so we ate a bit of everything as we went. Variety is definitely nice.

Try to enjoy it

It seemed impossible in Essex, intimidating as we crossed into Suffolk, and a gruelling breeze as we hit the “silly Suffolk” hills in the last thirty miles. I was ready to quit in Braintree, Rob asked me to kill him when we hit those hills. Throughout most of the ride we were adamant we’d never do it again. But we made it. You can too.

I really, really enjoyed cycling through the flatter part of Suffolk as the sun rose. It’s beautiful countryside peppered with lovely homes and picture perfect medieval Suffolk villages. I also had some fun conversations with strangers, and really enjoyed some of the tea stops.

You’ll find your own source of solace as those legs burn, and when you get to the beach you’ll definitely start to feel more than a little bit proud

Tired and triumphant of Dunwich, Suffolk

After you’ve had a moment to relax on the beach and wolf down a large cooked breakfast, you might even reconsider whether you’d do it again.